PHYSICAL HEALTH

“Abusing Sedatives To Get Skinny.” “The Women Sleeping Their Lives Away To Lose Weight.” Recent headlines like these about the “Sleeping Beauty” diet (taking sedatives to avoid eating, a.k.a. narcorexia) seem designed to shock. And shock, they do. But the behavior is not new.

I dabbled in it a decade ago when I lost a boyfriend to a motorcycle crash and was downsized out of a job that I adored. During that trying time, the only thing I felt I could control was my weight. So I began working out two hours a day and ate no more than 1,000 calories. Since I often hit that piddly number by 4 p.m., I’d pop a sedative. Sleep was the sole way to escape my unbearable hunger.

Ironically, doing that for nearly four months slowed my metabolism while fueling my depression. What’s insidious about eating disorders is that they often begin as a disciplined strategy to improve your body and life, but once they take over, they make both worse. “You’re essentially shutting off your life to not eat,” says eating disorders expert Rachel Salk, Ph.D. “That’s how powerful and destructive these distorted thoughts can be.”

Once I realized that the weight-loss plan I’d started so I could feel in charge of my life was crippling it, I sought help. Headlines like the ones above do anything but help, and in fact seem to exist to feed disordered ideas to pro-anorexia blogs.Women’s Health

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